RIP Natil. Sniff!

The YASD of the evening? Choking on a black pudding corpse! *headdesk* GAH! I should have known. And here I thought my YASD was going to be "swallowed by air elemental". ;)

I'd made it down to dungeon level 22. I'd cleaned out a 10x6 leprechaun hall on level 9, and had used the gold to boogie back to Minetown and buy my AC down to -18, which was pretty nifty. A few potions of gain level took me from level 12 to level 15. And I found a third ghost of mine (a previous iteration of Natil the Ranger, in fact) on level 11--the Big Room. Notable loot out of that haul was an extra set of GDSM and some more gold.

Decided to go looking for the Fort at that point, and made it down to level 22, picking up more gold out of vaults on the way. Found a couple of David's Treasure Zoos as well as some throne rooms, and had just killed my first two dragons in the throne room on level 22--a white and a silver. The silver one dropped scales. And eating the white one, don't you know, was the one that pushed me up into Too Satiated to Eat Anything Else. But was I paying attention? Nooooo! *headdesks some more*

Goodbye Natil the Ranger...

You choked in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 22 with 153557 points,
and 14178 pieces of gold, after 17734 moves.
You were level 15 with a maximum of 97 hit points when you choked.

You made the top ten list!

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    5342682  jenna-Arc-Hum-Fem-Neu ascended to demigoddess-hood.   376 [409]
  2    4585962  jenna-Ran-Hum-Fem-Neu ascended to demigoddess-hood.    94 [369]
  3     313780  jenna-Tou-Hum-Fem-Neu died in The Dungeons of Doom on
                level 27.  Killed by a captain.                         - [153]
  4     153557  Natil-Ran-Elf-Fem-Cha choked on her food in The
                Dungeons of Doom on level 22.  Choked on a black
                pudding corpse.                                        84  [97]

I see I've dropped a bones file. Muaha. If I can get another character that deep in the dungeon, that's going to be a hell of a stash to loot!

(x-posted between my journal and nethack)

2007 Book Log #36: Nightshade, by Mark Gatiss

This is one of the free Classic Doctor Who ebooks that the BBC has available for download, and I decided to read this 'un first on the grounds that it was Seventh Doctor and Ace, of whom I have seen very little, and that it was also calling itself a bit of a horror story, for which I was in the mood.

It's a bit odd jumping back to read Classic Doctor, when I'm so used to thinking in terms of Ninth and Tenth--especially Tenth. Seventh in particular was an odd change of pace, being of course very different physically from his later incarnations... and yet, at least in the hands of this author, showing signs already of what was to emerge once the new series got underway. This particular quote stood out:

Yet, for all those years, he'd put his own feelings to one side, tucked them away as if they were of no importance. Now the full weight of his troubles was becoming clear.

Instead of trying to confront his insecurities, like any rational being, he had buried them deep in his psyche.

He was the Doctor, after all, and expected to be immune to such things. Above such trivial matters as emotion and longing and... love.

It was only a matter of time before all those repressed feelings flooded his system like poison from an untreated wound.

It's rather funny that this book was written some time ago, and yet, rather indicative of what we were to get later. Hee. It's also worth noting that this particular author has in fact worked on the new series--he's the guy that wrote the episodes "The Idiot's Lantern" and "The Unquiet Dead". :D

Plot-wise, this one wasn't half-bad. You had your basic remote English town with creepy goings-on, your basic skeery monster killing people right and left, and some hardcore feeling old and run-down and almost ready to retire on the part of the Doctor. Meanwhile there was Ace, right on the verge of growing up and highly attracted to a handsome young local, and getting to blow stuff up at least once. There's a colorful side character who's kind of fun, some Nice Young People one hopes will get together, a particularly nasty person who does get his in the end, and a rather staggeringly high body count. There's a bit of exploration of cultural attitudes of the time--which is 1968--and quite a bit of callback to the Doctor's very earliest days with Susan. A bit of nice continuity there. Nothing too spectacular with the writing style; in one or two places, with overuse of sentence fragments, it kind of annoyed me. But all in all, a perfectly pleasant and quick read. Three stars.